As Belfast continues
to travel the seemingly inexorable road toward ‘normality’, ‘stability’
and ‘peace’, the past dies. Or, more accurately, it becomes delocated.
Delocation does not destroy the past but rather shifts it, sanitises it, builds
over it. Is this the true meaning
of ‘progress’, setting adrift the present from our shameful past, itself
constructed from a conflict that had become shockingly banal? If so, then
what we (Belfast) are experiencing now is something not delocated from
the past but a process that has never stopped.

Did not Henry Joy McCracken
(that ubiquitous figure on the Belfast scene) proclaim unswerving faith
in that illustrious idea?1 What other grand notions could have
filled the mind of that great bourgeois Edward Harland as he presided over
Belfast’s industrial heyday while the Socialists and Papishts were beaten
on the docks and burnt from their homes? Progress! Aye, a noble idea. Sure
was it not progress too that inspired the young British technocrats high
on LeCorbusier during the heady days of mass housing, when the working
class were no longer to be feared but something to be controlled, catalogued
and collated in accordance with their ‘naturally’ conceived divisions.

And now, it can perhaps
be said, Progressus Vicit:
the ancient divisions have been overcome in an orgy of vulgar consumerism.
United not by the common name of ‘Irishman’ but rather by the sub-nomen
‘consumer’. The End of History. A future defined by the objects of intended
acquisition or intangible ‘lifestyle indicators’ such as ‘gym membership’,
‘time shares’ or the accumulation of ‘air miles’. Past is become invisible:

“I used
to live here.”
“You used to live under the motorway? You must have been very
poor mummy.”

How can anything intrude
into such a timeless zone? A politics without history lacks all but the
bluster of an interminable, mindless discourse. It ceases to exist in all
but the minds of its supposed practitioners.

It is here that art appears
once again on the fringes of society’s hetero-mediated self-representation.
A society that believes itself to have vanquished history or at least that
it is now strong enough to confine history’s existence to certain places
and moments where it can be suitably ignored and forced once again into
intermittent invisibility.

The articulation of the
inaudible, the visualisation of the invisible, the materialisation of a
collective memory subsumed by a mountain of neon-encrusted guilt, facing
the present with all the force of the future…

To locate ‘control’ it
is necessary to peer beyond the glass and concrete facades of the modern
city and look to the configurations that arise in the swirling mist of
a forgotten and often distorted history. Not only do we transform ourselves
through the forging of our environment but we can be forged through the
transformation of that environment. Although this is clear, the role ideology
(overt and implicit) plays in this process is not. A town so dominated
by and bound up with the history of Unionism cannot then in its physical
and structural elements be immune from that stated ideology. Nor is Unionism
itself a free-floating self-contained body of dogma that stands aloof from
any external influence, but rather it itself operates as the articulation
of a certain self-justificatory Weltanschauung of a section of the Belfast bourgeoisie.
Dependent on the contingent circumstances, it regards itself on the one
hand as the guarantor of civil and religious liberty in this British dominion2 and,
on the other, as the guarantor of the ethno-religious hegemony of Protestants
ensured through an exclusionary all-class alliance.3

The primacy of ‘control’
in this ideological configuration is clear: first, the control of the majority
of the working class through a religio-cultural identification with the
State itself and, second, the maintenance of an economic environment conducive
to high rates of exploitation (due to the depression of wages created by
the existence of a Catholic underclass which served as a reserve pool of
labour).4 The space of the city then becomes a constant battleground
of transgression and manipulation leading to an inevitable carve-up as
zones are marked not only by social status but by allegiance. This process
(begun at the very beginning of Belfast as an industrialised city) continues
right up to the present day as ‘peace lines’ are still erected in the name
of social stability.

The increased levels
of ghettoisation that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s were indicative
not only of heightened dissatisfaction with the status quo by all sections
of the working class but it crucially signified the failure of Unionism
to contain the tensions implicit in the foundation of Northern Ireland.
The corporatist ideology that informed its functioning could no longer
exclude the growing and increasingly educated Catholic population whose
very articulation of itself signified a radically altered public. The ‘subjectification’
of this section of the population gave rise to a properly political situation
in which the previously un(ac)counted stepped into the breach of what has
been called the ‘empty universal’5, in which a certain section
of the people invoke the mantle of ‘the people’, thereby displacing the
supposed legitimacy of the existing order. Rancière characterises the politicisation
of the situation (i.e. the challenging of the status quo by an internal
albeit excluded portion of the population) thus:

“… it is through the existence of this part
of those who have no part, of this nothing that is all, that the community
exists as a political community.”6

Excursus I. Sailortown

The history of Sailortown
in the Belfast docklands reflects these trends clearly. For it was here
that a section of Belfast’s maritime working class experienced the industrialisation,
pogroms, hardship and eventual delocation that informed the history of
Belfast’s working class population. The forcible exit from the east of
the city where industry was strongest; depression and unemployment; solidarity
and community; finally, forced dispersion around the city. The destruction
of Sailortown in the 1960s illustrated the adaptation of official state
ideology to the conditions of modernity in which the values of community
and solidarity were subordinated to those of individualism and consumption.
The exchange of Sailortown for the M3 was a powerful metaphor for the values
that were coming to dominate the perception of space in the city. As Guy
Debord noted in 1959:

“The breaking up of the dialectic of the human
milieu in favor of automobiles (the projected freeways in Paris will entail
the demolition of thousands of houses and apartments although the housing
crisis is continually worsening) masks its irrationality under pseudopractical
justifications. But it is practically necessary only in the context of
a specific social set-up. Those who believe that the particulars of the
problem are permanent want in fact to believe in the permanence of the
present society.”7

“In this way, necessity becomes implicit in
the official discourse to ensure that no other option seems possible. The
importance of the task at hand will therefore override all other considerations
because history and the impermanence of the particular circumstances that
exist at any one time appear as fictions whose use is long past.”8

This is how Sailortown
could be destroyed without consultation and even with the trust of the
inhabitants.

However, the ghettoisation
of Belfast was by this stage firmly entrenched. The geographic structures
implying power relations old or new began to serve a radically altered
purpose as zones that emerged as accidents of history started to develop
a community possessing subjective agency. This process too was developed
and reflected on a physical basis through the visual self-representation
of communities that were becoming more and more solidified through political
actions and allegiance.

The painting of murals
was central to this process of self-creation and self-representation. Indeed,
the existence of such displays transformed the very nature of the place
that was inhabited: ‘it is the public space in which the [mural as] artefact
is sited that is changed.’9

So, the existence of
murals as the physical expression of the community also allows the community
to transform itself. This does not imply however that what had developed
were homogenous communal blocs acting in authoritarian unity, rather (as
Harvey points out10) there exists a dialectical relationship
between community formation and the institutionalisation of that community.
Such a dialectic creates an internally dynamic process of formation, expression
and supercession of the origins of the community itself which persist through
often heroic founding myths that serve to justify the authorities indigenous
to the community. This process is also replicated at the level of the physical,
i.e. in the fluctuating persistence of the mural through time:

“Although the painting of a mural may appear
to constitute the finished artefact, it actually may be just the beginning
of a complex social life, which may well continue long after the original
painting itself has been over-painted or destroyed.”11

The life of the mural
as it is reinvigorated by the community provides a potent reminder of the
possibility of that community fading away or losing relevance to those
who construct it. Its physical nature betrays an underlying fragility that
is exposed to shifts in values and the supposed imperatives of economics.

Excursus II. Barracks

“To dedicate a new school is not the same
as to convert a military fortress into a school. We intend to continue
converting even the small barracks into schools, because every town no
matter how small, had military barracks.”12

Throughout Belfast the
British military presence looms large in the form of barracks (some empty
some occupied). In Andersonstown, the barracks was closed in 2005 but its
status is still contested by the local community who have repeatedly demanded
(through community groups, political representatives and popular mobilisation)
that the ground on which it stood be handed over to the community as a
whole. However in recent years the Minister for Social Development has
twice attempted to allow the space to be acquired privately, most conspicuously
by the Carvill Group.13

The continued resistance
to the Andersonstown Barracks site remaining outside the control of the
community reflects the process of forming and maintaining a community mentioned
above. The creation of such a subjectified public demonstrates the impetus
to maintain a physical community of resistance that demands to recreate
itself and its environment on its own terms. The physical nature of this
process becomes clearer due to the rapidly changing landscape in Belfast.
That a community can articulate (and recreate) itself on such a basis also
points to the fragility of the processes that give rise to spatial conflicts
like this one. For through such a struggle, the reality of the changing
shape of Belfast becomes apparent, and the fictions that inform its seemingly
timeless centre are exposed.

III. Middle Class Ascendancy,
or the Dominance of a Fiction

“… the ‘middle class’ is, in its very ‘real’
existence, the embodied lie, the denial of antagonism… [it] presents itself
as the neutral common ground of Society.”
Slavoj Zizek (2000) The Ticklish Subject (London:
Verso) p.187.

The ‘common ground of
Society’ in Belfast is, according to conventional wisdom, anything but
‘neutral’. Contestation and transgression are the watchwords of present-day
Belfast as consumerism attempts to bring everybody into its indiscriminate
embrace. The emergence of Belfast as a focus for production and consumption
can be directly traced through the development of the ‘peace process.’
Richard Haas (then US Government’s representative in Belfast), in an address
to certain businessmen in 2002, highlighted the great increase in production
stemming from the ‘peace process’: foreign investment has created 31,000
new jobs since 1998; Northern Ireland’s manufacturing output has risen
by 25% in the past few years; and exports have doubled in the past ten
years.

Crucially, he also highlighted
the role the bourgeoisie play in structuring (both economically and physically)
the ‘new Belfast’:

“…we have seen time and again that business
leaders constitute some of the strongest voices urging Northern Ireland’s
politicians to do the right thing.”

“Business men and women focus year in and
year out on the bottom line; in doing so, they probably best understand
what can be gained – and lost – from any given situation. Economic progress
is measured in profit margins, productivity, returns on investment, and
other tangible indices. This progress manifests itself in the wider community
through higher incomes for families, home and car sales, more theatres,
shops and restaurants in thriving neighbourhoods. In both these realms
– that of the economy and that of the community – we have seen direct benefits
from the peace and stability created by the Good Friday Agreement.”14

Peace and stability,
then, form the basis from which a successful consumption-driven society
is established. The language used in Haas’ statement is clearly illustrative
of the nature of the ‘right thing’, as he calls it. For the ‘right thing’
in this context is clearly the ending of widespread, non-state violence15 so
that an arena might be created that would allow a correctly consumerist
model to arise.16

What then emerges from
the economic development that corroborates, justifies and defends the ‘peace
process’ is an arena that in fact disguises the social relations that sustain
it. Thus the reality of antagonism is automatically expelled from the city
centre as public sphere. The intrusion of the political is prohibited by
the instrumentalisation of the public sphere for the purpose of a consumption
that effectively ‘de-publicises’ the public. This de-publicisation has
a number of facets. Firstly it locates the coming together of disparate
persons into a unity only by dispelling any intrinsic commonality by replacing
it with an extrinsic identity forged through the experience of sociality
as mass consumption. Secondly, it supplants the critical (that is to say democratic) potential of an experience
of the public. Such a critico-democratic potential exists in the very possibility
provided by the coming together of disparate individuals into a public
mass that by its own existence legitimates and/or challenges dominant ideas
and institutions. In this way the mass or active public is replaced by
the homogenising aggregation of individuals as undifferentiated consumers.

Furthermore it should
be clear how this corresponds to the intermittently hysterical praise of
the stability provided by the ‘peace process’ and the all but non-existent
critique. To this fact can be added to the striking absence of any real
debate on the causes of the current economic crisis and its relation with
the political institutions and policies that have been followed with so
much élan by the political and business elite. It must then be understood
that what is happening here is very much tied up with the process of the
de-publicising of the public mentioned above. For only in this way is it
possible to appreciate the wilful blindness that has infected the entire
body politic in this time of economic woe and the terminal inability of
politicians in Ireland to come up even with a coherent criticism that does
not entirely reek of crass opportunism, never mind an economic plan that
does not seek recovery in the exploitative speculation that characterises
mainstream economic and political discourse.

In terms of the ‘visual’,
this process can be seen in the fact that displays that on a superficial
level may seem to have some political import (such as the anti-war demonstrations
that have occurred occasionally over the past number of years) are met
with placid support at best or more often with total disinterest by people
who are after all in the centre of Belfast to consume. Thus what may seem
to be political becomes in fact a mask with which to disguise the absence
of the political. And it is this very absence that defines the public,
defines it in the sense that it negates it.

This is not to say however
that the real antagonisms that underlie the politico-economic fabric have
evaporated. Rather, they have expression in the persistent sectarianism
that recently resulted in the murder in Coleraine of Kevin McDaid as two
police officers stood nearby; circumstances disturbingly similar to those
in the murder of Robert Hamill in Portadown twelve years ago, and only
days after the public inquiry into Hamill’s death heard evidence of police
collusion. The recent spate of racist attacks in Belfast further confirms
the violent reality underlying increasingly hollow official statements
heralding official recovery and political progress.

The question then becomes
one of whether it is possible to challenge the violent, exploitative nature
of the status quo at all, or whether the retreat into sectarianism and
racism are inevitable outcomes of a situation whose own logic demands the
eradication of these features yet depends on them for its very existence.
This reality is evident in the marketing of Northern Ireland as an essentially
low wage economy17, a situation directly derived from a sectarianised
conflict that both divided the working class and created a climate of underinvestment.

Excursus III. New Protest
in Belfast (RIR / No Bush)

When the Royal Irish
Regiment paraded through the streets of Belfast on 2nd November 2008, the
notion of the police as arbiters of the ‘distribution of the sensible’
(le partage du sensible)
in Rancière’s schema18 becomes apparent. For in calling the
demonstration, the British Ministry of Defence clearly saw such a parade
as apolitical and so suitable for the public realm. The intrusion of the
political (in the sense of an aggrieved and historically located subject)
into the public sphere was thus prohibited and confined to the limits of
the city centre through the rulings of state agencies enforced by the PSNI.

This
process of the expulsion and persistent intrusion of the political is mirrored
in Belfast artist Christoff Gillen’s recent work on the Black Mountain, at
the northwestern fringe of the city. Rather than being forced out of the
consumer-driven public sphere, Gillen’s work enunciates into the public sphere
from afar, thus replicating and subverting the forcible removal of the political
from the public. The re-located (and so re-created) public becomes the people
of Belfast willing to engage with a visualised text that articulates the
absent public without becoming lost of the privatised public of the centre.
In this sense the de-publicisation of the centre becomes the vehicle for
the re-location of the (political) public. The ever-nascent public then
repeatedly attempts to overcome its destruction by insisting on being heard
on its own terms.

What Gilen’s work evinces
then is a referral to a point in the past when that same mountain was the
focus of a public in action, evoking the formation of the United Irishmen
on nearby Cavehill or the use of the mountain as a signifier of a community’s
support for the republican hunger strikers in 1981. On these occasions
a line was drawn that marked the transformation of a people from subjected
mass to subjectified agent. The significance of such allusions today must
surely rest in the stultifying atmosphere of a consumer-led strategy for
growth in an entrenchedly sectarian environment (an aspect further highlighted
by the location of his work directly above the so-called ‘peace line’ separating
the Ballygomartin and Whiterock Roads) and the dissolution (though not
disappearance) of the prospect of reclaiming the space lost from the public
in the name of a universal yet concrete enterprise.

IV. Space, Conflict & Art,
or Towards the Future

In light of the continued
economic decline, rising unemployment and halted development, it is not
without interest to reflect on Haas’ words to the Belfast bourgeoisie in
2002. Although it was clear that ‘peace and stability’ would be necessary
for a properly thriving capitalist economy in Belfast, the other factors
at work in such a building process (such as the concrete potential and
structural necessity of crisis enmeshed within the very framework of capitalism
itself) were flagrantly ignored. The concomitant suppression of the expression
of individual and cultural difference as anything other than oppositional
identity that is inscribed into this process further exposes the vacuity
of the rhetoric of progress and normality.

The reality of the situation
continues to reside at street-level where the hegemonic ideology is both
affirmed and resisted in a continual interplay of images, texts and fragments
whose very existence attests to the conflictual nature at the heart of
reality in present-day Belfast. The official non-existence of that ideology
is attested to by the facts of loyalist decommissioning and Sinn Fein/DUP
scrambling for US dollars. The reality is however made clear by the new
inscriptions that dominate working class communities where naked sectarianism
(in the form of graffiti stating ‘KAH’ or ’KAT’19) vies for
importance with the affirmation of the supremacy of the (secular) ‘Hoods’20 –
a final victory over divisive ideology!

The destruction of the
public (as self-articulating agent) then forms the background to today’s
visual culture (itself dominated by an aesthetically hollow consumerist
bulk) as different ways are increasingly sought to overcome the historic
failures of emancipatory politics. Where these are to be found can be seen
in the fragments of resistance that litter our streets, in the oppositional
and the still-existent communities that mobilise against the privatisations
of space which remain central to dominant narratives of ‘development.’
It remains to be seen however what role the disused and abandoned building
sites will play in this coming dispensation; and whether developer-in-chief
Barry Gilligan21 will find any contradiction between this role,
and his position of chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board.

Notes1. McCracken
was one of the founders of the United Irishmen, leading them in the Battle
of Antrim in 1798. He was hanged by the Market House in the city centre.
2. “Northern
Ireland is the one part of the United Kingdom which has a written constitution
- the Government of Ireland Act, 1920. This Act specifically prohibits
the Northern Ireland Parliament from making any laws which endow one religion
or discriminate against another. Any such Act could be challenged in the
courts and ruled to be inoperative. A similar prohibition applies to executive
acts.
In effect, the Government is not entitled to do what Parliament is not authorised
to permit it to do. If there were such illegal actions by the Government,
any person has the right and the opportunity to challenge them before the
Courts.” Ulster Unionist Party (n.d. 1968?) Northern Ireland Fact and
Falsehood: A frank look at the present and the past. (Belfast: Ulster Unionist Party). http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/discrimination/quotes.htm
3. As
Craig insisted: “All I boast is that we are a Protestant Parliament and
Protestant State.” Quoted in Jonathan Bardon (1992) A History of Ulster. (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press) pp. 538-539.
5. Slavoj
?i?ek (2000) The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso) p.179ff.
6. Jacques
Rancière (1999) Disagreement (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press)
p. 10
7. Guy
Debord, Situationist Theses on Traffic, see:
http://libcom.org/library/internationale-situationiste-3-article-2
8. Herbert
Marcuse (2002) One Dimensional Man (London:
Routledge) p.97. He points out the danger of such technical rationality
when he writes, “If the linguistic behaviour blocks conceptual development,
if it militates against abstraction and mediation, if it surrenders to
the immediate facts, it repels recognition of the factors behind the facts,
and thus repels recognition of the facts, and of their historical content.”
9. Neil
Jarman, Painting Landscapes: the place of murals in the symbolic construction
of urban spaceshttp://www.cain.ulst.ac.uk/bibdbs/murals/jarman.htm
10.
David Harvey (2001) Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) p.192
11.
Neil Jarman loc. cit.
12.
Fidel Castro (1961) http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1961/19610128.html
13.
See: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ni/?id=2008-11-10.8.13 for details.
14.
See: http://www.state.gov/s/p/rem/15318.htm
15.
It is interesting to note in this context that later in his statement (ibid.), Haas sees the “normalisation” of the British
military presence as a prerequisite for “moving the peace process forward.”
16.
See Jean Baudrillard (2005) The System of Objects (London: Verso) passim.
17.
http://www.investni.com/index/locate/why_northern_ireland/competitive_costs.htm
18.
Jacques Rancière (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum) p. 3, p 70.
19.
“Kill All Huns [Protestants]/ Kill All Taigs [Catholics].
20.
The most common annotation of this is the ubiquitous U[p]T[he]H[oods].
21.
Gilligan is the Director of Big Picture Developments, who were responsible
for a major apartment development at the former Ormeau Bakery in south
Belfast. Gilligan / BPD also own important sites across the city including
the Crumlin Road Courthouse, which was sold by the Northern Ireland Courts
Service for £1, and has now been destroyed by fire.